Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: Debug Tools

ID 683552
Date 9/24/2018
Public
Document Table of Contents

5.3.4. Adding Finite State Machine State Encoding Registers

Finding the signals to debug finite state machines (FSM) can be challenging. Finding nodes from the post-fit netlist may be impossible, since the Compiler may change or optimize away FSM encoding signals. To find and map FSM signal values to the state names that you specified in your HDL, you must perform an additional step.

The Signal Tap Logic Analyzer can detect FSMs in your compiled design. The configuration automatically tracks the FSM state signals as well as state encoding through the compilation process.

To add all the FSM state signals to your logic analyzer with a single command Shortcut menu commands allow you .

For each FSM added to your Signal Tap configuration, the FSM debugging feature adds a mnemonic table to map the signal values to the state enumeration that you provided in your source code. The mnemonic tables enable you to visualize state machine transitions in the waveform viewer. The FSM debugging feature supports adding FSM signals from both the pre-synthesis and post-fit netlists.

Figure 41. Decoded FSM MnemonicsThe waveform viewer with decoded signal values from a state machine added with the FSM debugging feature.